What is this tool?
A practical field guide to building a cross-sector coalition for intergenerational fairness at local, regional or national level in collaboration with the Danish Coalition for Future Generations and the European Commission. It draws on learnings from the Danish experience with four founding organisations in 2024 and roughly 40 members in the coalition today. Nine modules take you from assessing readiness to a launch plan, and each one ends with something you can put on a table: a rationale, a charter, a partner map or a portfolio.
Why is this helpful?
Responsibility for future generations is spread across sectors, portfolios and levels of government. Often, the people most affected, have no organised voice of their own. The decisions that will bind them are taken now and elsewhere: budgets and investment programmes, infrastructure and land use, pensions, climate commitments and more. No single entity holds all the legitimacy, evidence, public voice, practical capacity and political access needed to change how those decisions get made. A coalition puts several mandates behind one demand, lets each member work on questions related to their own purpose, and stays in place between elections, which is the timescale the agenda is about.
Download the booklet: A practical guide for organising for intergenerational fairness
How to prepare:
Read Part I first: how the Danish agenda travelled from the UN Declaration on Future Generations in 2024 to a named commitment in the 2026 government programme, what a coalition can credibly claim of that route and what it cannot, and five lessons drawn from it. Then use the guide to locate yourself and the ecosystem. Line up three or four diverse founding partners and have a name in mind for whoever can credibly host that first conversation, the convener's standing is what makes the agenda legitimate.
What to do:
- Step 1: Decide why, and what. Run the readiness check, then write one paragraph on the problem, the decision or practice you intend to change, and why existing arrangements cannot carry it. The honest answer is launch, pilot or listen first, and if an existing network could host the work with a revised mandate, join that instead (Modules 1–2)
- Step 2: Agree on purpose, partners and governance. A one-page charter, partners mapped by function and power rather than by logo, and the lightest governance that still makes authority and accountability explicit. (Modules 3–5)
- Step 3: Choose activities for your launch year. One piece of evidence that makes the problem visible, such as a baseline data, a scenario set or a citizen survey; one public activity where people can imagine and shape the agenda; and one named decision you intend to change: a policy, a budget line, a planning framework, an investment criterion, or the impact assessment a proposal has to pass. Each should feed the next. Begin on in-kind contributions, because organisations join when they can see their own purpose in the agenda. (Modules 6–8)
How to do this well:
- A minimum viable coalition: Credible conveners, a small founding group, one decision target, one demonstrator, one public activity. Add structure and funding once the work proves its value.
- Contribution, not credit: Political change has many contributors; claim what your coalition made more possible and stay precise about what is still missing.
- Young people are not future generations: They can speak for their own lives; no present group can automatically speak for those coming after us, so pair participation with foresight, ethics and explicit accountability.
What it brings:
- Inspiration: A coalition makes the long term something you can work on this year: a named decision, a real window, and a proposal for when it opens.
- Connection: Organisations that have never shared a table discover that climate, housing, health, democracy and education are arguments about the same longer time horizons, and that they need each other to win them.
- Care: Responsibility for future generations only holds if someone is answerable for it between elections. A coalition keeps the obligation alive when political attention moves on.
Example:
The Danish Coalition for Future Generations was founded in 2024 by Globalt Fokus, the Wellbeing Economy Lab, the Academy for Social Innovation and the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, in the wake of the UN Declaration on Future Generations. It has grown to roughly 40 member organisations on in-kind contributions and philanthropic funding.
In June 2026 the new Danish government programme committed to handing on a greener country to future generations, named their right to clean groundwater, and announced an expert commission on wellbeing economy. The coalition reads this as a policy window rather than a settlement: Denmark still has no systematic assessment of long-term impacts and no permanent representation of future generations.
Partner: Danish Coalition for Future Generations in collaboration with the EU Policy Lab, Joint Research Centre (European Commission)